Timberland’s First-Ever Creative Director, Christopher Raeburn, Talks

Christopher Raeburn, 36, was once a Cassandra: Because ever since founding his brand in 2009, when few in fashion really gave a fig, sustainability has been at the very heart of his work. Now, as we all know, the wider fashion world has caught up, and sustainability has become central to almost everything. Which is doubtless among the reasons why today, nearly 10 years after his first remade-from-military-surplus garments were produced in his then studio, a disused peanut-packing factory in East London, Raeburn has been named the first-ever creative director of Timberland.

That’s a big gig. Huuuuge. Timberland is a properly iconic American footwear brand that since 2011 has been part of an outdoor-leaning brand conglomerate, VF Corporation, which also includes Eastpak, Vans, Lee, and The North Face. VF’s brands are expected to generate revenues of $13.7 billion in 2019, and Timberland is a significant part of that footprint. Despite this decade’s seemingly unshakeable sneaker supremacy, Timberland’s defining product, the 6-inch boot, retains impeccable streetwear currency—in the last few weeks alone new collaboration iterations by Bape and Marcelo Burlon have been released. Yet there is way more to Timberland than one boot style, and in appointing Raeburn, the company has found a creative figurehead as multifaceted as itself.

Raeburn is one of three brothers who grew up in rural Kent, outside of London, and joined the Air Cadet, the junior arm of the Royal Air Force, as a youngster. Thanks to his car restoration enthusiast dad, Alan, Raeburn became fascinated with function and engineering—tinkering about and making things, basically—and developed his own interest in fabrics. This led him to fashion school where he became enchanted with the technical excellence and relative cheapness of military surplus garments. A lifelong passion for the outdoors, shared with his brothers, is another element in the Raeburn algorithm. This has generated a small but highly regarded label on the London menswear roster (although, he shows coed) that produces clothes that subscribe to the brand mantra of Remade, Reduced, and Recycled. That’s a massively shrunken version of the Raeburn résumé but should provide context for the chat we had following news of Raeburn’s new role today. Disturbed only by a blaring fire alarm (him) and a ringing doorbell (me), we checked in to discuss this awesome appointment.

Timberland—wow!—congratulations. How did that come about?

I go way back with Timberland. My first real moment of awareness was when I was studying at the Royal College, and Timberland released the Earthkeepers range in around 2005 or 2006. I remember being inspired and thinking that it was fantastic for a brand on that huge level to try to make a difference. So I’m really excited about what’s happened today from that perspective. How did it happen? Well, first I did a project with Eastpak, which went well. So, then I was asked if I was interested to work with Timberland, which is part of the same group, and I most definitely was. That led to a Fall 2018 collaboration that sparked the conversations that led to me being offered the creative director role, which is a real honor. What’s fantastic to me is that Timberland is a brand that wants to change, but which also has so much integrity in terms of how it is working at the moment. It is 45 years old and it is trying to do things with authenticity and purpose—and having an opportunity to build on that is a rare thing.

How do you plan to negotiate the demands of Timberland and your own brand?

Well, our values are pretty well aligned. You know about my business in terms of Remade, Reduced, Recycled, and if you think about it, Timberland makes a lot of its products in a very purposeful way, too—to be hard-wearing, with a lot of longevity. I think it is a perfect match. Yes, Timberland is about the iconic 6-inch boot, but this job is about a lot more, too: It’s about the apparel, and focusing on community aspects and retail aspects and how we can drive a lot more than only products—which is precisely what I try to do with my business every day. There, we have our Raeburn Lab space over in Hackney that’s been open for two and a bit years now, and we’re running workshops to engage our community of customers, and these have already taught us so much. Now, what’s so exciting is to continue exploring these ideas but on a scale Timberland represents . . . it’s an amazing thing.

I might not put this in the interview, Christopher, but you mentioned Earthkeeper boots: I bought a pair years ago, not because they were partially recycled, but because I saw a photographer wearing some at a show and thought they looked pretty cool. But then, once I’d worn them a lot, I was super-frustrated to find out when I went into a Timberland store that there wasn’t a resoling option. It seemed crazy that a boot that sold itself on being so heavily recycled couldn’t itself be resoled and reused.

No, you should put that in! Because that’s a really good challenge. We have to look at everything that Timberland has done and learn from both the successes and failures, then really galvanize ourselves to push forward. The exciting thing for me is that after nearly 10 years in the business, finally this industry is waking up to the fact that we are making all this stuff in really quite a damaging way environmentally, and it is changing the way we are doing things. The good news is that at Timberland we are already in pretty good shape. But I am really looking forward to working with all of that history yet also to do things in a really modern way: to move forward.

So what are your first thoughts about the stamp that you bring to Timberland? The changes that you make?

Jim Pisani, the president of Timberland, wants things to change—that’s very exciting. He wants everything from retail to communications to messaging to be standing for something. I said to Jim, “You are going to have to be comfortable at points with being uncomfortable.” And by bringing someone like me, from a business where the point of what we do is to challenge and disrupt the industry, to bring me into a company of this scale, well, that’s, I think, an amazing endorsement of the way Timberland wants to change. And hopefully, it is a sign of the times more broadly, too.

Congratulations, Christopher! And to Timberland for having the acuity to sign you up.

If you’d like to check out Raeburn’s own line, he is about to open a new retail space right next to Central Saint Martins at the Thomas Heatherwick–designed Coal Drops Yard in London.